Hey, What's In Your Wake?

In a standard resume, you'll see a job title listed, and an employer name and some dates, and then you'll see a list of bullet points. There are the What I Did There bullet points. It's great to have a list of the things that you did on each job.

But here is the problem. People think about listing What They Did, and they think of duties. They think of daily tasks. At nine o'clock I did this, and at ten o'clock I did that. This is unfortunate. The stuff is boring. Plus, it's obvious. If you're a Customer Service Manager, we can guess what you had to do at nine and ten o'clock. You trained Customer Service folks, you answered the phone yourself, you monitored service levels, you ran reports.

Of course. What else would you do in a job like that?

There is a better way to talk about the What I Did stuff on your resume. Instead of those task-and-duty bullet points, what if you used your bullet points to talk about your accomplishments?

Here's a short list of some typical accomplishments on the job:

Created first New Employee Orientation program

Mentored summer intern working in our department, creating Training Plan and monthly learning goals for her

Combined four cumbersome weekly reports into one consolidated decision-making tool

Planned, executed, hosted and emcee’d large (300+ guest) donor events

Launched first internal newsletter, showcasing company milestones and including weekly contests for employees

Created Trade Show Operations Manual which became the cornerstone of the company’s trade-show knowledge management system

Now, you can see that not one of these accomplishments includes winning a competition, being awarded a patent or being the Number One Anything. When we think of accomplishments, we often think “What was I best at?” Nothing on this list of accomplishments entails being best at anything. Rather, you’re specifying what you

Made Better
Did for the First Time (Innovated)
Thought Up On Your Own, or
Got Done

on the job. Now, we could argue semantics and you could say “Liz, that event-hosting thing, that’s a duty” and for sure hosting events WAS a duty at your old job. But it’s an accomplishment, too, to plan and execute and emcee a big event like that. It’s a feather in your cap. Producing a weekly report week after week and answering customer calls and serving on this or that task force – these are not accomplishments. They are just the duties that any normal adult would expect any other normal adult to attend to, day after day.

So am I saying you're bad, because you don't have any accomplishments to list on your resume? No way! I know you have accomplishments to list on your resume. You just have to think back, about what you made happen at each of your jobs.

Now, let's jump back to that "served on task force" thing. Serving on a task force should be an accomplishment, because presumably the task force made something better than it had been before. But that note about serving on a task force won’t become a resume-worthy accomplishment unless you also tell us what you accomplished on that task force.

Otherwise, you might as well say on your resume "Was in the room when a historic event occurred."

Whenever you’re tempted to write on your resume, “Served on XYZ Task Force,” stop and think: what was my role on that task force? Surely, there was some unique piece of the puzzle that was yours to own.

For instance, at my son’s kindergarten Halloween party yesterday, I had something specific to do. I had two things to do, in fact: to bring a fruit tray to the party, and to supervise one table of five kids making happy-face gourds. I did those two things, and I did ‘em well, baby! No one can take that away from me!

These are my accomplishments. I didn’t just volunteer for the party. I’m falling asleep just writing that. I supplied fruit for the children and supervised a gourd-painting craft activity at a kindergarten Halloween party. Is that resume fodder? I hope not. It was fun, though. It’s just an example of how to claim responsibility for the specific piece of the larger project that was yours to own, versus saying "Worked on a large project," which is the most un-useful thing you could say on a resume.

Don’t say “served on.” Don’t say “participated in.” Talk about what you owned. Talk about what you got done that made the company or the kindergarten party more successful than it would have otherwise been. You've got those feathers in your cap, but you've forgotten about them, because we don't dwell on things like that as years go by. Sit down right now and think about those past jobs you've held. What was your contribution to each one?

What's in the wake behind your boat?